


look sharp and steady into the empty parts of me

by corpsesoldier



Category: The Locked Tomb Trilogy | Gideon the Ninth Series - Tamsyn Muir
Genre: Angst, Emotional Manipulation, Gen, Harrow the Ninth Spoilers (Locked Tomb Trilogy), Missing Scene, cytherea is not your friend
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-05
Updated: 2020-12-05
Packaged: 2021-03-09 19:06:56
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,080
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27901213
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/corpsesoldier/pseuds/corpsesoldier
Summary: Good God... Cytherea would have known as soon as she looked at you.Cytherea the First asks a favor of Gideon Nav.
Relationships: Cytherea the First & Loveday Heptane
Comments: 10
Kudos: 89





	look sharp and steady into the empty parts of me

**Author's Note:**

> [slaps the lyctors] these war criminals can fit so much TRAUMA

“Take off your glasses, please, Gideon the Ninth. I’d like to see your eyes.”

Cytherea smiled up at the cavalier of the Ninth. There was something gratifying in the puppy dog way Gideon silently did her bidding. It had been a struggle not to laugh while the girl was nearly defeated by the mechanism of her reclining chair. She had thanked Gideon very prettily and then just kept talking, hoping to snare her long enough to get a good look at her. The scion and the cavalier of the House of the Ninth both had very interesting energy signatures; a roiling, disjointed tangle of thanergy for the dark-eyed Reverend Daughter and, perhaps even more intriguing, a bonfire of something that felt a good bit more like thalergy burning in Gideon the Ninth. Cytherea was quite keen to examine it more closely.

The Ninth obligingly slid the dark glasses off her face, leaving little smears of white paint on them where they’d touched the bridge of her nose. She laid her eyes bare with every appearance of easy obedience. Cytherea’s brain gave a mute animal kick, a senseless reflex, like a dead thing touched with an electric current.

Alecto’s eyes.

She almost reached out and snapped the cavalier’s neck. Alecto’s eyes, Alecto’s eyes in the Ninth cav’s face. God and the Emperor, was the Tomb _open?_ Had Mercy and Augustine’s ridiculous mess of a plan worked after all?

But Gideon the Ninth was looking at her with a shy, almost guilty hunger and that was certainly not an expression the First had ever worn. If Alecto the First ever hungered for anything, Cytherea would have wagered on something vile, like blood or the screams of the damned. She reined in her violent impulse before it sparked so much as a twitch of her fingers—she did not believe she was, generally speaking, a woman of violent impulses—and narrowed her eyes in thought. She took a little pleasure from the flush she saw creep up Gideon’s neck, just past the edge of the facepaint, and then felt abruptly sick.

“Oh, singular,” she heard herself say. There was something titanic lurking in the depths of her stagnant heart. Something that seemed poised to rip through her, to cleave her ribcage in two and burst forth like a ravening tumor, destroying and consuming in mindless fury. “Lipochrome… recessive.”

Her mouth kept moving, spouting something close to nonsense. She was very good at nonsense. It was easy, as a Seventh necromancer, to drape herself in frivolity and disaffecting smiles the way a Third noble might don a mask for a midnight revel. No one thought very hard about what you were doing or saying if they believed you silly, or even a little stupid.

Gideon certainly didn’t seem to care what she said, as long as she was saying it to her and smiled a little as she did, poor lamb.

Alecto’s eyes in the Ninth cav’s broad, sweet face. The Ninth cav who didn’t look even slightly Ninth, save for the taut air of deprivation that hung around her, with her brilliant hair and warm, dark skin that was meant for sunlit terraces and not a borehole cracked into a planet’s black heart. The Ninth House operation, which Cytherea had thought overly sordid even for her siblings. The possible introduction of foreign genetics into that sad, forgotten House. God, those eyes—

It was like seeing a ghost. Cytherea knew a little something about that. Wasn’t there a ghost in permanent residence in her own eye sockets? Wasn’t Loveday (oh, and thinking her name still hurt) always watching? Cytherea could still picture her with perfect and terrible clarity, her brick wall of a face, that hard mouth that only ever smiled for her, and imagined her weighing Cytherea’s deeds with calm equanimity, judging the worth of her sacrifice.

“Imagine the ghosts of everyone who must have lived here...worked here…”

 _It’s my job to keep you alive,_ Loveday had said, her eyes an earnest electric blue that scorched Cytherea down to her unworthy bones. Loveday’s hand had clutched her shoulder just a trifle too hard—she was usually so careful—and Cytherea felt the bruise bloom almost instantly. _Please. Let me do my job._

“We press down the hands of a clock, to try and stop it from ticking the last second.” And oh, how the Seventh would love her now—dying beautifully for ten thousand years.

Gideon was looking at her, mute and rapt and entirely at her mercy, and she had no idea how precious she was. How precious they all were, this old tomb full of children, and Cytherea would see them destroyed rather than allow them to defile themselves at the feet of the Emperor. But Gideon the Ninth was something extraordinary and awful, an omen Cytherea could feel shuddering at the base of her skull. The gleam of her eyes was that of the sword in the moment before it cuts out your heart.

She felt rigid inside her skin. Inflexible ice wrapped in rotten, honeycombed meat that she thought might slough off if she made one wrong move.

Cytherea laid her thin hand on Gideon’s arm. She felt the minute twitch of a repressed flinch light up the muscle fiber like a neon sign. Beneath the riotous noise of Gideon’s body going about the wet and messy business of life there was that hot thalergetic roar, like heat pouring off a furnace—and then beneath that, if Cytherea focused very hard, a familiar citric acid scour that she had only ever tasted once before. 

She smiled beatifically at the Ninth cav. Her hindbrain was filled with one long scream.

The Ninth House operation. A child of God to be fed to the Tomb. Alecto’s eyes in Gideon’s face. John’s thanergetic signature twined through her own. The living daughter of the King Undying misplaced in the dark for all this time, bearing eyes she should not have, eyes she _could_ not have, unless Alecto’s eyes were not her eyes at all—

Oh, may the unquiet dead of the ten billion grant them all the mercy of the quick death. It had always been a lie.

She wanted to throw up. She wanted to scream until she spit blood into the Ninth’s face. She wanted to kill every last person in this house and paint the walls with gory recriminations large enough for John to see from his flagship. She wanted, pathetically, her cavalier.

“Stand up for me,” she said.

Gideon stood up for her.

“Draw your sword, Gideon of the Ninth.” 

It was ugly and selfish. Cytherea wanted to see the smooth motion of a cavalier drawing her sword. She wanted to see the clean lines and confident stance of a woman born to the blade, who had carved her body into a sacrament of steel. She wanted the shine of the rapier in the sun and the scrape of it unsheathing, the perfect control of a held thrust, the whisper of air as she changed forms. She wanted all that strength and training and grace brought to bear for her sake alone, deployed at her request. She wanted a cavalier’s indulgent smile and exasperated huff of laughter and calloused fingers circled protectively around the knob of her wrist.

Gideon the Ninth had a soldier’s strength and a bare-knuckle brawler’s ferocious confidence. Her stance and her forms were loose-limbed and energetic, utterly removed from the stiff rigor of career cavs like the Second or Third. She grinned openly as she twisted the rapier in a high mock parry from sheer joy of movement. Cytherea thought she flexed a little under the other woman’s appreciative gaze.

It was lovely and it was completely wrong. Cytherea choked on self-loathing.

She felt herself struggling as though in a net, each strand a memory that burned like acid where it touched her skin. Every moment of the last ten thousand years was happening all at once, one after another after another, pummeling her like a fall of hail. She is sitting on the terrace with Gideon the Ninth. She is sitting on the terrace with Loveday the Seventh. She’s at Canaan House that first day after, when the First House sunlight had seemed suddenly cold and gray, and the memory twists, warps; Loveday is gripping her elbow, leaning down to ask if she’s all right, and looks at Cytherea with soft brown eyes. She’s on the Mithraeum and Cassiopeia has cooked something that makes Cytherea’s nose run from the smell alone, and Loveday is sitting beside her, snapping that Cassy always goes overboard with the peppers. She is on a planet she is meant to kill and Loveday, sword in hand, looks at her and says, _This is wrong._

Cytherea thought she had reached the upper limits of pain some millennia ago, but oh, she was wrong.

She could not forget why she was here. This—new information didn’t change her goal. If anything, it should make her resolve that much firmer. No more. No more smiling cavaliers fed to the Emperor’s hungry, self-effacing smile.

Gideon. Gideon was important. What a powerful weapon Gideon the Ninth could be in the right hands. And Gideon wanted so _badly_ to place herself in someone’s hands.

There were cracks in the Ninth House. A cavalier breaking from her necromancers side for the first pretty girl to show some vulnerability. The full body flinch when the Reverend Daughter had grasped Gideon’s neck. The taut possessiveness in every line of Harrowhark Nonagesimus. Gideon left to wander. The fresh vow of silence. The quiet relief in Gideon’s body when she dropped her stance and laid the rapier to rest, as though she were pleasantly surprised by her own competence.

The rapier pointed straight up, one of Gideon’s hands cupped beneath the pommel for support. Yes, there were cracks. And Cytherea could worm her way into them, if she was very careful. There was frustration and loneliness written in every bone of the Ninth’s body. Gideon would submit beautifully to the bit and bridle as long as Cytherea smiled when she put it on.

“Gideon the Ninth,” Cytherea said, slow and sweet as honey, “are you used to a heavier sword?”

The blind panic on her face was exquisite. She fumbled to sheath her sword and froze, caught, a rare butterfly with pins through its jewel-tone wings. Those amber eyes were wide with fear, and Cytherea wondered how she could have thought, even for a second, that this gallant, golden girl was Alecto come again. Gideon teetered on the edge of something and Cytherea only grinned conspiratorially, as though to say, _come now, you can trust me, I can keep a secret._

She was winning. She pulled Gideon’s strings very gently, and Nonagesimus wasn’t here.

So of course her pet cadaver chose that exact moment to turn up. Goddamned corpse programming was too rigid. The dead man stomped onto the terrace without even a glance at the other cavalier and said, in an airless wheeze, “It’s shut.”

Well, that was one less thing to worry about, she supposed.

But the moment was gone. Gideon reeled away from her like from the edge of a cliff, like a mouse who had seen the cat’s eyes in the dark. She did not quite run—Cytherea might have liked to see that—but she was fleeing nonetheless.

Cytherea bit her cheek in frustration. But she had plenty of time, obviously. She knew how to play these things slowly. One last gambit before the girl was gone, though, just to see.

“Gideon the Ninth!” she called.

And sweet Gideon turned back to her, glasses slipping down to reveal a look as crumbling and unsteady as any of Canaan’s ancient pillars. She looked back and hesitated at the door, and Cytherea smiled to know the hook was set.

“I hope we talk again soon,” she said, putting some slack in the line, letting her go.

In the rotting remains of her first real home, with her false cavalier silent beside her, Cytherea the First dug her perfect nails into the flesh of her arms until they bled, and she felt her ghosts in every cell of her body as the wounds knit back into perfect, unblemished skin.

It would be nice to have a real cavalier again. And when Gideon finally came to her, the two of them would raze the Empire to the ground.

**Author's Note:**

> you can come say hi on tumblr [here!](https://corpsesoldier.tumblr.com)


End file.
